25

Viral research explicitly attends to an ontology of viral matter, proclaiming since the 19th century a viral world that lies beyond the thinking and feeling human being; a figure that partitions what is apprehended and what is not through a rapidly homogenising scientific method, to be sure, but also through anticipation, fear and pain. To put this another way, viral research has developed as a means of inquiring into the inhuman nature of matter such that its manifestation as an infection within a human host becomes possible. In the process, viral studies enact their own partitioning of the Earth via experimental designs that infer and indicate, as well as map and delineate, the nature of a viral matter that reaches across into human horizons and, importantly, can thus be traced back from the site of infection into the inhuman.  

What emerges from such work is a cohering viral world that subsumes difference into that which is known and that which is currently elusive but is hopefully to become (via further experimentation) known. Inside the shifting confines of this one viral world, hopes and fears around a human life flourish, all dependent upon an experimentation that is itself conflated with sustained curiosity and even creativity. This coherence ruptures viral matter from any other viral world that it animates, of course, which thus becomes inimitable to experimental method; inimitable in the sense that it lies beyond the ken of an elusivity that is scoped and probed, given sketchy coordinates, by viral research. But also, the cohering work of a viral world that tends to a biosecurity identifying risk and proffering containment and immunity, and a scientific epistemology that proffers truth and wonder, must needs eschew those subjects whose desires and proclivities are not so appropriately orientated. To aver this viral world is to aver not only science, but life itself.   

Thinking through the implications of the above, gesturing towards an ontology of matter by using scientific findings as evidence that such matter exists – that viral matter, in this case, is an inhuman Earthly force – is a fraught enterprise. To be sure, such a gesturing can provide the grounds for a politics of entanglement. But also, to be attentive to the ‘inhuman’ can, and has, perpetuated experimental design that reconfigures time and again the flesh of experimented-upon-life in an effort to disambiguate the matter and work of that which should not cohere in the flesh of human bodies, and attendant policy initiatives based on purifying the same by controlling or eradicating viral matter.  

To note, as viral research does time and again, that the mode of emergence of viral matter is mediated or conditioned by a range of relations – ecological, corporeal, social, discursive – is to presume, assert and bring into being a coherence to viral matter, each stabilising what is in effect a plane of equivalence wherein matter now exists. Such relations indicate particular capacities for work in the world that can produce coherent matter (a virus particle, an infection, a taxonomy, an injunction, a feeling of dismay). And yet, somehow, these do not add up; in experiment after experiment they resonate, butt up against each other, slither away from each other, congeal and dissipate. 

What is more, while viral research has usually found an inhuman viral ontology in the way in which viruses both evolve and shape evolution through the infection of life – an infection harkening back to the primeval even – natural selection as the engine of difference in such an evolution has itself become subject to an anthropogenic forcing. No longer is such a deep ontology distinctive by virtue of its presumed unfolding in and intensification of the flesh of the world, processes that mark out the ‘what’ of viral matter. Now, it can be discerned in the design of that flesh.  

CRISPR and transgenic evolution still very much assume a viral ontology that precedes and unfolds outwith human beings; but, in side-stepping, and even reversing, natural selection, they identify an ontology of becoming that can be harnessed within the observational timespan of human beings. In effect, a viral ontology has been brought back into the realm of the phenomenological, locating it in a politics of immediacy, anxiety, and anticipation as well as desire. The partitioning that allows for a cohering viral world - a partitioning animated by a continual creating and pinning down of an elusiveness as to the ‘what’ of viral matter unto and beyond the genetic level - is no longer secure, and the subsumption of difference that viral research carried out can no longer be so easily maintained. 

Deborah Dixon